Chapter 1 #3
Dom sealed the mask and bagged. The kid dosed.
And for ninety seconds the two of them worked a stranger's failing body on the floor of a gas station bathroom that smelled like pine cleaner and worse, no wasted words between them, the kid calling every action out in that flat clean voice and Dom answering in single syllables — and it was, Dom would think about this later, in the dark, and despise that he'd let himself think it, the closest thing to not alone he'd felt in a year and a half.
The man came back the way they always did.
Ugly. A gasp like a diver breaking the surface a second before his lungs quit, and then a swing — an arm coming up wild, because that was how it went, you snatched a man back from the lip of the dark and he came up swinging, furious to be dragged into all this cold hard light — and Jonah caught the wrist clean before it landed on either of them, no drama, already talking.
"Hey. Hey, hey. You're all right. You're all right, I've got you.
" Not clinical now. Not the flat voice. The bright one — but aimed, turned into something low and steady and absolutely, unreasonably certain, his hand still around the man's wrist but easy now, thumb moving, the way you'd hold onto something that might bolt.
"You went out on us back there. You're back now.
I know it hurts, I know, that stuff we gave you feels like straight garbage, that's normal, that's the medicine doing its job — you're doing so good.
Just breathe. That's it. Just breathe with me. "
The man breathed.
And Dom, on his knees on a bathroom floor at nine at night with a bag valve mask in one fist, watched a twenty-four-year-old talk a terrified stranger down off the wall of his own resurrection — and understood that the kid had the thing you could not put into a man.
Dom could teach him the drugs. The rhythms. Which bay door stuck and how far.
He could not have taught anyone alive to sound like that — like the single worst moment of your life was survivable, purely because someone had gone ahead and decided, out loud, to survive it there on the floor alongside you.
He'd known exactly one other medic who could do that.
Don't, Dom told himself. Do not go there.
They packaged the man. Loaded him. Ran him to Sacred Heart with Jonah in the back, and through the little window into the box Dom could see the kid keeping up a low, steady patter the whole way — and could see, too, because Dom's curse was that he always saw, the precise moment the man got scared again, and the precise moment Jonah's hand came down on his shoulder and stayed there.
Marisol took the handoff in the ambulance bay, all sharp eyes and zero patience for anybody's excuses, and she signed their sheet and gave the kid a once-over that snagged on the fold lines still creased into his sleeves.
"New," she said.
"Extremely," Jonah agreed.
"He any good?" This one aimed at Dom, chin jerked at the kid, and Dom heard the trap sitting inside the question and stepped wide around it, and Marisol read the not-answer the way she read everything on a busy night and let it go with a small curl at one corner of her mouth.
"Welcome to the worst job on earth, new guy.
Coffee's free. Everything else is gonna cost you. "
Outside, the bay had gone cold enough to see your own breath hang.
Jonah leaned back against the rig and dragged the cap off and shoved a hand up through the overgrown hair, and for one second — one, when he thought Dom wasn't looking, except Dom was always looking — the brightness went out of his face all the way to the bottom.
He looked, in that second, about a hundred years old. He looked like a man who had seen this exact call before, from the wrong end of it, from the floor, and had been running flat-out toward it ever since.
Then he caught Dom watching, and the switch flipped, and the kid was grinning again, jamming the cap back down. "So. On a scale of one to washing me out. How'd I do."
Dom got in the rig.
After a beat, Jonah climbed in the other side — and the seat that had sat hollow for eighteen months had a person in it, breathing, warm, close, and Dom hated how wrong it felt, and hated more the small traitor part of him that insisted it didn't feel wrong at all.
"You did fine," Dom said.
It came out rougher than he'd meant it to.
He put the rig in drive and rolled out of the bay before the kid could do anything with it — before Jonah could grin wider, or worse, go quiet and thoughtful, both of which Dom could see coming down the road and neither of which he had the tools left to survive tonight.
Fine. The kid had been a mile past fine and they both knew it. The kid had been the real thing — the thing you couldn't put into a man, the thing that had walked into Dom's dead and settled little life at 2114 on a Tuesday and picked up a bag valve mask like it had always belonged in his hands.
Six weeks. Sign him off or wash him out, Von didn't care which.
Dom told himself he'd wash him out.
He was already lying, and some cold and honest part of him — the part that did the paperwork with the dome light off, the part that had long since stopped needing to see the boxes to know they were there — knew it, and said nothing, and let him drive.